Introduction

This introduction begins with a popular culture example of the ways scholars who insist on particular, stable approaches to canonical texts can limit potential textual interpretations. In the context of Shakespeare’s sonnets, recurring similarities between most modern scholarly readings necessitate a return to the earliest readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets, who read the sonnets in a wider range of contexts and sometimes applied multiple interpretations to them even within a single reading encounter. An understanding of these early readers’ interpretations will help modern readers imagine several more diverse approaches to the sonnets overall.